


Rows And Columns

by trace_of_scarlet



Category: Bletchley Circle, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Historical, Badass Women, Crossover, Gen, SHIELD, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-11
Updated: 2013-08-22
Packaged: 2017-11-20 20:44:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/589452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trace_of_scarlet/pseuds/trace_of_scarlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No matter what one did during the war, it isn’t every evening that one finds an agent of SHIELD standing on the doorstep.</p><p>(Or, how Natasha recruits an ex-SOE mathematician to SHIELD.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Rows And Columns

**Author's Note:**

> AU for Avengersverse, unless Natasha’s been taking the same Infinity Formula as Nick Fury.
> 
> Beta-ed by my beloved and best Ashie.

The stranger is waiting for Susan at her front door when she struggles home from the shops, shrouded like a widow in the musty drizzle of London’s early autumn evening. Susan doesn’t see her at first, being as she is fully occupied with a sack of potatoes which has inconveniently developed a large hole, so that in fact she nearly dumps her shopping directly onto the stranger’s exceptionally expensive patent-leather shoes.

“Oh,” she says apologetically, squinting at the woman in the lukewarm grey light. “Are you, er, collecting for something?”

She knows it is a stupid thing to say even before she says it: if anything, the stranger actually resembles one of Millie’s friends in her insouciant self-containment as she stands on a stranger’s doorstep as if Susan herself is the trespasser here. She looks at Susan almost imperiously, all elegant black dress-coat and pillarbox-red lipstick, her amber curls set in the very latest (or so Ruby at the fishmonger’s had informed her) style, and suddenly Susan cannot help herself but feel an absurd stab of jealousy. This woman is so self-composed, so _female_ : surely for her there are no maths problems at midnight, no feelings of displacement, no yearning for numbers as if she has something urgent she should be doing when the cold light of a peaceful world says there is nothing, nothing at all. Too late, too late, says the White Rabbit; ‘projecting’ say Millie and Jean.

The woman puts out her hand; Susan attempts to juggle the potato bag and her handbag and finally drops both in confused disarray. “Susan Gray?”

“Yes.” She frowns, worried by her memory’s apparent deficiency. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

“My name is Natalie Rushman.” Her voice is generic American, all Marilyn Monroe softness, but Susan’s war-brain (the tiny voice behind her thoughts, nagging her with all she could have been) hears the Eastern European behind it like a bell, possibly Polish or Czech but most likely Russian. “I’m here on behalf of SHIELD.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.” But the power of good manners is such that she shakes the woman’s hand anyway, even as the number-patterns in the back of her mind tell her that she understands perfectly well.

(SHIELD, Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division: sister division to STRIKE, both products of the former Scientific Strategic Reserve. Jean did some work for them immediately post-war, dividing operatives between splintering agencies, which none of the rest of them were ever supposed to know about.)

“We heard about your team’s work for SOE,” the woman explains, and to hear the forbidden name spoken aloud so plainly is like a slap in the face after hysteria. “And in the... other affair in '52.”

“Oh,” Susan says stupidly, but in her head she can already see herself and Millie and Lucy and Jean, slotting into place like a well-solved code. “What can I do for you?”

“There’s been a situation,” Miss Rushman says primly, “And you were recommended by a mutual friend.”

 _Who?_ Susan wonders, but she doesn’t really care; only cares that there is a problem, a new conundrum, a new puzzle for her to solve.

“We’d like you to come in.”


	2. Columns and Rows

"She's a Commie, of course," says Millie, with her own brand of lightning-quick assurance which Susan instantly shushes. "Well, Russian, anyway. Moscow, I should think."

So Millie hears it too, the dry song of the Eastern Bloc behind the soft all-American purr of Miss Rushman's voice and the click-clack of her Dior heels. Susan wonders what she makes of it, of all this. Of leaving home, of leaving the children (of course, Millie has no children; she wonders if she minds, and realises she really should know), to run into the wind with a woman with amber-danger curls, on the promise of a puzzle.

 _Amber_ , Susan thinks. At the traffic lights, it means _get ready_. Ready? Ready for what?

She - Miss Rushman, or whatever her real name is under the perfect Max Factor mask - warned there would be danger, standing under Susan's porch in tacky-grey autumn damp. But only a very little danger, she had added, voice very mild. _You'll_ be right out of it. She had emphasised the _you_ , just gently, drawing the lightest of spiders-web lines between Susan and herself. _Amber_ , Susan thinks again, sounding foolish to herself even in the privacy of her own head. Dangerous as a hornet's stripes. _Is_ Miss Rushman dangerous? She thinks that perhaps she is; she reminds her of some of the _other_ SoE women, the ones Bletchley almost never saw, flitting between shadows with chameleon faces and gun-barrel eyes, who clenched their fists the way other women blew kisses. Susan wonders what becomes of such soldier-women, left without a war -- not that she could ever have been that kind of woman. Could Millie? Perhaps. Millie has always been _x_ , the unknown quantity: flexible, the possibility in every equation.

Still. Absurd to think like this, to follow word-patterns and hunt for phantom connections like a poet. (In any invasion, she recalls, they shoot the poets first. Who said that? Churchill? Surely not.) Useless to attempt an analysis on so little data. _Data, data,_ the war-cry of Bletchley Park. _We are_ nothing _without data!_

And now, with the war over and all her data inconsequential. Is she doomed to be nothing again?

The airship, when the smart black car takes them to it, is vast and bullet-grey with a distinctive black-eagle ensignia embellished on its rump.

"I _told_ you she was a Communist!" crows Millie in a triumphant sibilance, and finally Miss Rushman turns in the driver's seat to look at them directly for the first time since that conversation on Susan's doorstep.

"I'm not a Communist," she informs them, sounding - what? Amused? Like a cat watching a mouse, perhaps. "But yes, I'm Russian. Or I used to be."

"I didn't say Communist was a _bad_ thing," Millie says, definitely amused - and possibly flirtatious - but then she _is_ x, inscrutable. All Susan can think of is her data, to have _some_ , however meagre, is a shocking relief. After all, they never _did_ have all the data, and always managed, even when there were more gaps than the _Times_ crossword puzzle. Now, perhaps, she can begin to hypothesise, sketch out lines of enquiry, begin to understand.

 _Amber_ ; she thinks again: the thought is persistent as drizzle, clicking over like a difference engine; that means _get ready_. Get ready? Ready for what?


	3. If X = Y then...?

The SHIELD airship is magnificent: impossibly vast and futuristic, iron grey as a tank. It reminds Jean of the Titanic (she'd waved it off from Belfast as a small girl sitting on her father's broad shoulders, visiting relatives) and she says as much to Lucy, sitting shy beside her. Lucy only nods mutely, but the nice coloured GI sitting in the front passenger seat turns around to say "Well, we don't claim she's unsinkable, but she's close."

Of course, he's not a GI, not really - he's a good deal more important than that, if he's who she's reasonably certain he is. But the GIs during the war were the first black Americans she'd ever met, and some associations stick.

She wonders what she's doing here. Whatever it is, isn't she too old for it? She should still be married, a mother like Susan, doing infinite tiny tasks and pretending that they make her happy. Even her mother on her death bed wanted to know when Jean would find herself another 'nice young man', regardless of the fact that at the time she was gone forty. (And anyway, these days there _are_ no nice young men. All their young men are dead, or still fighting the war raging in their heads.) But even in her teens, fighting her own battle for Oxford, she had guessed then that she could have sums and calculations or she could have a husband, a cosy warm life in slippers, and chose without hesitation the shining curves of a graph over those of a shining ring. Then it had seemed a golden, pioneering choice, wrought in newness... But now? 

She doesn't know. In the war she had a purpose again, following her patterns into battle and bringing home seamen safe from U-Boats, and that purpose flickered again when Susan turned up pell-mell at her door two years ago. And now? 

Now there has been no Susan to flip the blackboard and call them down the rabbit-hole after her, only a coloured American with a faintly ridiculous name and far too much knowledge about the SoE, who is now escorting them to who knows where.

We're going to see the Queen of Hearts, she thinks absurdly, feeling her lips (always so dour, so hard; _you'll never get a man with a face like that_ ) smooth into a very faint smile. Off with their heads!

As if they hadn't all lost their heads already, she thinks, as the nice young GI opens the car door for her to step out: she has thought all this in the long seconds the car took to turn the corner and pass through security. The airfield's breeze is wolf-whistling through her hair; Lucy is wide-eyed and shyly silent at her side. She wonders if it was wise, bringing a child like Lucy into this. But then Lucy is in fact _not_ a child, she reminds herself sternly: she may be the group baby, but she has seen as many wars as any of them; has shown her own steel. If she sobs in the night over the dead her perfect memory cannot allow her to forget, then who amongst them can say she is alone?

The weather is grey but flighty as a dancer; her hairdo (never exactly glamorous to begin with) is as buffeted as if she were at sea. She puts her arm around Lucy, who smiles back at her as if she isn't scared at all.

"We're at Heathrow," Lucy tells her, voice soft. "Seventeen point two five miles from Charing Cross."

Jean believes her: such details are not the kind of information Lucy ever gets wrong. "Aye, but I think we've still a fair way to go."

"That we have, ma'am," their guide agrees, flashing them the briefest of all-American movie-star smiles. "But from here on in, we'll be getting there in style."

"Well, I'll grant you it's certainly _a_ style," Jean allows herself to remark, and doesn't wait for his guidance before beginning to ascend the gangway. Lucy follows her, silent and curious, and their escort brings up the rear like military guard.

They aren't off to see the Queen of Hearts at all: they're inside the belly of the beast, dutiful - to mangle her mataphors disgracefully - as Daniel in the lions' den. Surely she should be old enough and wise enough to know better than to entertain such childish notions, but after all she is only a woman, isn't she? Or so that's what they told her when the war was over and she was no longer an SOE operative, merely another discarded female.

Still, she knows her duty; she is prepared to do it. And perhaps she will be useful, and perhaps - just perhaps - it might be even be interesting.


	4. If Y=X and CxT = X, then C/R = TxY and...?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once more unto the breach, dear friends.

"The director will see you shortly," Commander Fury informs them, with what Susan suspects is just the faintest flicker of slow-burning humour. She wonders what it signifies; beside her, Millie opens her mouth to pose an impertinent question, but is cut off by Jean's voice of irritation controlled.

"How long exactly is this going to take, Commander?" she demands. "My employer -"

"Has been briefed and is aware of the situation," Fury tells her, with another flash of his slow shark's smile. "Within reason, obviously. I assume you've all signed off on the Official Secrets Act?"

If these people have even a fraction of the influence they claim, then surely they must already be aware of the answer? And in fact nothing in his expression or tone suggests that it truly _was_ a question (though Susan has always been told that she is a really dreadful judge of such things), but nevertheless she sees Lucy's head rise and Millie's back straighten and Jean's lips thin out at the mere mention of the OSA and its associated meanings, of all they did in those twenty leaky, draughty huts and that huge draughty house in those six grey-and-red-and-notes-on-a-blackboard years.

(She still wonders, for she still does not know, just how the others feel about those chaotic, inexorable, cold-wind-blowing years they spent working together, working apart, working anywhere and anywhen but always working, working, working. The life they'd all had at Bletchley, where a woman could be both female and a computer; where one could wear postbox-red lipstick and still prove oneself in chalk-white upon black. Do they feel as she does, that despite the marriage and the children (whom she knows rather than feels that she loves), everything since has been merely... making do? Or are they sensible - have they parcelled up that other world, that other work as a kind of tension dream, and are they now awake and alive to the brave new Britain they were promised? Do they ever pull out the war-memories like a hatbox under the bed, to stare with nostalgic longing at a life worn only once, and briefly?)

"Rather like waiting on the Dragon's inspection at Bletch, isn't it?" Millie observes unexpectedly, with a St Trinian giggle. "Do you suppose we'll all pass muster?"

"Not knowing the parameters for success, can't say," says Jean, voice brisk. "But we'll find out soon enough, I daresay."

"Maybe it _is_ the Dragon," Lucy pipes up, gentle-voiced. "Wanting us back for something."

"I'd have thought she'd be only too glad never to see _Millie_ , at least, ever again," Susan hears herself remark, harrying her mind back to the present like a schoolgirl caught playing truant. "What was it she called you on your last meeting, Mill?"

"The most brilliantly unreliable, irreverent, effortlessly intelligent young woman she'd ever had the misfortune to encounter, and that she devoutly hoped she never would see your like again."

Millie's mouth had opened to reply, but it's Fury who speaks; one by one, the four of them turn to stare at him, bewildered.

"Yeah," he confirms dryly, "We checked up."

They look at each other, worried-shocked-confused-concerned, but whatever they might have said is lost as a sleek-haired Miss Rushman, now clad in a well-tailored counterpart of Fury's uniform, exits the director's office with a tigress's calm slink. She looks from one to the next of them with the thoughtful curiosity of Special Branch, and finally settles on their guide.

"Commander Fury, ladies..." She smiles like a cat awaiting smoked salmon, as behind her the door slides silently open. "The director will see you now."


End file.
